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EMNLP Findings2025

NAP2: A Benchmark for Naturalness and Privacy-Preserving Text Rewriting by Learning from Human

Shuo Huang, William MacLean, Xiaoxi Kang, Qiongkai Xu, Zhuang Li, Xingliang Yuan, Gholamreza Haffari, Lizhen Qu

Abstract

The widespread use of cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) has heightened concerns over user privacy, as sensitive information may be inadvertently exposed during interactions with these services. To protect privacy before sending sensitive data to those models, we suggest sanitizing sensitive text using two common strategies used by humans: i) deleting sensitive expressions, and ii) obscuring sensitive details by abstracting them. To explore the issues and develop a tool for text rewriting, we curate the first corpus, coined NAP 2 , through both crowdsourcing and the use of large language models (LLMs). Compared to the prior works on anonymization, the human-inspired approaches result in more natural rewrites and offer an improved balance between privacy protection and data utility, as demonstrated by our extensive experiments. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/shuo956/NAP2-privacy- rewrite.

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Cited by top-tier papers1

  1. Privasis: Synthesizing the Largest "Public" Private Dataset from ScratchHyunwoo Kim, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Michael Duan, Rui Xin et al.ICML 2026 · 3 citations

Builds on15

  1. Language Models are Few-Shot LearnersTom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 64,255 citations
  2. Deep Learning with Differential PrivacyMartín Abadi, Andy Chu, Ian J. Goodfellow, H. Brendan McMahan et al.CCS 2016 · 7,620 citations
  3. Privacy Risks of General-Purpose Language ModelsXudong Pan, Mi Zhang, Shouling Ji, Min YangS&P 2020 · 291 citations
  4. Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy via Inference with Large Language ModelsRobin Staab, Mark Vero, Mislav Balunovic, Martin T. VechevICLR 2024 · 211 citations
  5. Can LLMs Keep a Secret? Testing Privacy Implications of Language Models via Contextual Integrity TheoryNiloofar Mireshghallah, Hyunwoo Kim, Xuhui Zhou, Yulia Tsvetkov et al.ICLR 2024 · 198 citations

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  1. Zero-Shot Privacy-Aware Text Rewriting via Iterative Tree SearchShuo Huang, Xingliang Yuan, Gholamreza Haffari, Lizhen QuEMNLP Findings 2025
  2. Beyond PII: How Users Attempt to Estimate and Mitigate Implicit LLM InferenceSynthia Qia Wang, Sai Teja Peddinti, Nina Taft, Nick FeamsterCHI 2026 · 1 citation
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